


Advent: Dessert

by FyrMaiden



Series: Klaine Advent 2014 [4]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M, Non-specific Christianity, Religious Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 14:43:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2776910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Klaine Advent Prompt: Dessert</p>
            </blockquote>





	Advent: Dessert

When he was growing up, Blaine’s father didn’t allow alcohol in the house. The topic was not open to discussion. There would be no alcohol at all, not even at Christmas when they would invite their neighbours around and share their food and their hospitality. After dinner, Blaine’s mom would give him a slice of pie with real cream, and his father would disappear into his study with his friends for dessert, and would not emerge again until long after Blaine had been put to bed.

As he got older, and his bedtime got later, Blaine came to understand certain truths. One of them was the existence of a bottle of sherry in the back of a cupboard otherwise full of flour and candied fruit. He didn’t ask, but him mom smiled and kissed his head and said she loved his dad but not necessarily his church. ‘Sometimes, sweetie,’ she said, ‘You just have to drink something.’

In his early teens, he thought maybe he understood that more than she would have liked, because he had a suspicion that a vague alcohol induced buzz would be the best way to get through meals with his aunt when she visited and compared him to Cooper a lot, always asking when he was going to grow up and give her sister grand babies. ‘Blaine likes boys,’ his mom chirruped, spoon paused in the green beans, sounding a little like a cuckoo clock. She finished with the beans, returned the spoon to the bowl, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Blaine wondered whether, if he were older, she’d let him do that too.

As he grew, and as his father and his friends - church and secular alike - continued to disappear into the study, closing the door behind them, for ‘dessert’, Blaine started concocting fantasies of what grown ups did for afters. He had images of smart men in smoking jackets, and green baize table tops, and a haze curling blue smoke, all the result of long hours with black and white movies full of handsome gentlemen and beautiful girls with flawless skin. His mom would wash the dishes and ask him if he wanted anything, and then come to sit with him at the table, helping him with his homework before running through her own catalogues and magazines if she had time, Once she had retired to watch evening soaps, Blaine would take his laptop back upstairs to talk with his friends and play games before turning in for bed.

At 16, he had his first boyfriend, a real cutie from across town. He came to Blaine’s school, and then stayed, and Blaine had fallen in love. Amongst the firsts they shared had been Blaine’s first experiences with alcohol, neither of which had been as impressive or as suave as he would have liked. The first one led to a date with a girl, one of his (not quite, yet) boyfriend’s best friends, and the other had seen him drunk on one beer, his fragile system not quite ready for the effects of even weak, watery booze. They would laugh about it later, but Blaine walked home that night and his mom had known just from looking at him that he was drunk, had taken him inside and given him water and helped him to bed so that he father wouldn’t know. He told her he loved her, and she hugged him gently. ‘Sleep it off, sweetie,’ she whispered, and turned out his bedroom light.

With college and lack of curfews came late nights in small clubs, whiskey chasers and weak screwballs, and alcohol hazy journeys home across the city to bundle into bed and curl up in the warmth of Kurt’s body. Experimenting with alcohol doesn’t last long. It’s fun, but it’s not everything he thought he was missing out on when he was 10. They keep beer in the fridge, for when friends come round, and it’s not the secret it was when Blaine was growing up.

Blaine doesn’t, in the end, have many hangups left from his father, but he does still ask Kurt, when their dinner is over and they’re comfortable on the couch, if he wants dessert. It’s a conscious echo, an in joke, and a way to keep those memories alive. He has no desire to forget, and less to go back, and this makes him smile and remember.


End file.
